After fixing a few specific bugs, Haiku now runs on the Asus EeePC - the 701 model, that is. "It is with great pleasure that I'm able to announce that Haiku (rev26666) runs on the Asus EeePC! I own a 701 model, and have sporadically been testing out Haiku revisions on the machine. For months I've been unable to boot Haiku, but somewhere along the line, the bug I filed got squashed, and Haiku will boot off the machine's internal 4gb fixed disk!" Wireless, LAN, and the APM do not work, but sound does thanks to the OSS driver. Installation is a tad bit complicated (it involves booting Haiku in a VM in Windows XP and copying the contents of a nightly build over to a real hardware BFS partition, and adding Haiku to the ntldr), but at least it works.

A computer that's designed to be small & lightweight - and an OS that's designed to be small and lightweight. And the EeePC is a speed demon compared to the hardware that was available when BeOS was last commercially-developed (as many folks have pointed out here, even a 1GHz CPU is overkill for BeOS).

Agreed. I'm hoping to see a usable Haiku release candidate come out around the same time the price drops significantly on first-gen EeePCs.

And I can personally attest to a 1GHz machine being overkill on BeOS r5; I have a PIII Coppermine at 1GHz that gives me almost zero UI lag and is quite fast on things like files searches and encoding music/video. I really wish OS X and Gnome/X11 could be as peppy.

I run a weird Zeta/R5/Haiku hybrid on a 1ghz Pentium III-S Tualatin (512kb cache, 1.4ghz but running on a 100mhz fsb) and it absolutely flies. Only slow bit is the hdd IO (10k rpm scsi just isnt up to snuff.. its ooold). I wish other OSes were this quick. :/

A computer that's designed to be small & lightweight - and an OS that's designed to be small and lightweight. And the EeePC is a speed demon compared to the hardware that was available when BeOS was last commercially-developed (as many folks have pointed out here, even a 1GHz CPU is overkill for BeOS).

Personally, I think that Haiku developers should focus on supporting this device (or a small array of devices) rather than taking the scatter gun approach. Work to make sure everything in it is supported as it should be - out of the box. Maybe they could create an alliance with the makers.

While I could agree, don't forget that ULPC makers are not that much worried about the OS cost. After all, they all have since long secured OEM fees for Windows XP, and their customers supports are well-skilled on this OS.

Plus, Haiku lack a lot of apps these makers want out-of-box.

Now, the OS-hobbyist who wants to have Haiku running well on his latest ULPC will have 1) another computer(s) to do it and/or 2) will more easily tolerate Haiku issues to fully support his latest gears.

It's would be very nice to run Haiku on such devices indeed. Haiku is very suited for this, since it is bloatless.

But netbooks should not be the main focus in my opinion! Haiku will -hopefully- be a great workstation OS and it would be a pity to have all the power and elegance just for some browsing. Oh no, I want to have R5 replaced (and surpassed) on my workstation!

> - no MS Office compatibility
There is Gobe, Abi, ...
OOo isn't really fitting the "simple and small" goals
However next versions target modularity to be able to provide lighter versions, so that's good for us. And I have contacts for OOo.

> - no Java VM yet.
Right but there is the OpenJDK endorsed port started.

From an OS development point of view, the Eee PC is just a normal laptop, using standard components. Yeah, it's great Haiku runs on it, but not that suprising. Try porting Haiku to, say, a Razorbook / Alpha 400, and then I'll be (slightly) impressed.

Actually the EEE has a few additional constraints and gotchas that make it slightly more complicated than a "normal" machine. It can only boot from a USB CD-ROM, the NIC is a rather obscure device and you have to be careful of the solid-state storage: filesystems like BFS and AFS aren't totally suitable for such devices because they tend to produce a large number of small writes, which can age the flash quickly.

So it's not quite as simple as "Stick the disc in the drive and boot it".

It would be the perfect for those netbooks, and I have always wondered why no producer has taken in consideration the option to provide it as preloaded.

Maybe is because of the lack of applications, I do not know much about application availability, I do not think there are many apps for Haiku, thinking about the basic apps that eeepc provides: brower, openoffice, skype, pidgin etc..

Well it's not old news if nobody knows about it :-p I wasn't aware of this article, but much of the world isn't familiar with the Russian language, and the way it's translated makes it hard to decipher the content.

Yeah. Much of the world, talks on simplifed semi-english tech-language. Much of the world, too lazy for translate something from local "other non-english countries" sites (as we do), or even learn some additional languages (as some of us do).

But no-o. Most of the world, said loud: "Quick learn 'easy english' and put away your own language. This will be better for all! Or if you dont, you just not existed!"

Sorry for that cr@p, but events like that sometimes give a real pain in the A$$ (for the rest of us).

...I was thinking why does not a relatively large software corporation just buy out the Haiku development and and hire all their developers and get it buffed up into a full brown product and usher in a new generation of computing?

If I was Microsoft I would do something like that. Take Haiku, pay their developers, build a huge community around it, toss backwards compatibility on windows apps out of the window and forge a new path! Sure it will be a lot of work, but I think Microsoft is in a unique position because they have so much money and the talent to actually pull it off. I dunno maybe I am smoking something thats not illegal to come up with this lol. I know if I was Microsoft I would do something merging Haiku and some concepts of Singularity if thats even doable and go that route. They could have Vista as their mainstream OS but make this one for power users, gamers etc etc.

On wikipedia it says about Haiku that "basic SMP support" is being worked upon. But Ive heard that BeOS was SMP from the beginning and utilized many cores/cpus well? I thought SMP support was very good? It is not?